NANTY GLO, Penn. – Tyler Laverick returned to his hometown on Sunday night to mourn another friend and former teammate lost to a suspected drug overdose.

He and some of his buddies headed to a local bar to have a beer and reminisce about Chad Schilling, who died over the weekend.

But even then they could not escape the impact that heroin is having on their old stomping grounds. A group of people were believed to be using the drug in the bar’s parking lot, Laverick said, and the police were called. 

“It was an uneasy feeling of, ‘Is this really happening right now?’” Laverick recalled on Monday, hours before his friend’s funeral.

Schilling, a former football star at Bishop Carroll High School in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania, died at age 32 on Saturday from a possible drug overdose.

While Schilling’s death is believed to be from heroin, it will not officially be classified as such until a toxicology report comes back, Cambria County (Pennsylvania) Coroner Jeffrey Lees said.

Once confirmed, it will make Shilling the third member of the school’s 2001 football team to die from a drug overdose joining his first cousins, twins Cory and Ryan Byich.

So far this year, there have been 14 confirmed fatal overdoses in Cambria County, seven were heroin and the other half were of combined drug toxicity. His office is waiting on eight other toxicology reports from suspected overdoses in the county.

“We’re having fatalities all over the county,” he said. “It’s not one specific area.”

According to a study from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Philadelphia Field Division (PFD) Intelligence Program released in November of 2015, Cambria County had the third highest rate of drug-related deaths in 2014. Cambria County had 31.22 drug-related deaths per 100,000 people, according to the study, behind Philadelphia County with 41.98 drug-related deaths per 100,000 people and Susquehanna County with 33.4 drug-related deaths per 100,000 people.

Schilling’s death illustrates how the effects of the nationwide heroin epidemic affects Americans of all races, income levels and demographics. 

“It can happen to anybody,” Jeff “O.J.” Schilling, Chad’s father said. “I don’t care if you’re poor, you’re homeless, you’re wealthy – it can happen to you. So get help.”

The former Bishop Carroll football coach, Craig Sponsky, echoed his sentiments. “If it can happen to him, it can happen to each and every one of us.”

Laverick, who grew up on the same street as Schilling in Nanty Glo, believes the borough has undergone a stunning transformation.

“It’s unbelivievable,” said Laverick, who now lives in Arlington, Virginia. “To hear his family and everybody talk about the surveillance that’s going on, I’m like, ‘Where am I at right now?’ It seems like I should be in Northeast D.C., but instead I’m in Nanty Glo, Pennsylvania.” 

Friends and family members who gathered at the home where Chad Schilling grew up on Tuesday said that heroin could easily be obtained within a block or two.

“Probably every street around. I bet it’s as easy to get as a can of snuff,” said a family friend who is a former heroin addict and asked to remain anonymous.

Laverick has no desire to return to the town where he grew up.

“I’m scared to bring my kids back there and raise them,” he said, fully cognizant of the irony of feeling safer in suburban Washington, D.C., than in rural Pennsylvania.

Knopsnyder writes for the Johnstown, Pennsylvania Tribune-Democrat.